itty bitty teensy weensy Disputed flag mod

[Eden Smallwood]

Well er mumble it's just that I made a little mod mumble and it's nothing really, but I like it, so maybe it will motivate someone else to do a better one, or something.

It's for the flag of the Disputed Regions, currently attributed to The Riddler from Batman, which is of course ridiculous. A historically correct flag, attributing those regions to The King Of All Countries can be had here:

http://www.angelfire.com/mac/programming/cmbb/DisputedFlag.html

No artistic criticism necessary. Oh! I made two, because the first fancy one I made, I found that my wimpy little system downsampled it into mush, so that's why there are hi and lo detail versions.

Eden

[Mark Gallear]

It is very late on a Saturday night in England and I am very much worse for waer. I fell off my chair and almost chocked laughing!!!!!

Can you be locked up in Germany for displaying such uneutral flags!!!

Seriously, how do you do this trick with angelfire and get them to host a mod for free. Is it very technicalkly difficult.

CDV seem to be teaching me all kinfds o new skills!

Dirty Mark

[Rogue Legion]

Cool flags Eden, Thanks

[Eden Smallwood]

Originally posted by Mark Gallear:

I fell off my chair and almost chocked laughing!!!!!

Ah that's nice. Positive feedback feels good.

Can you be locked up in Germany for displaying such uneutral flags!!!

I don't know- I don't think I'll ever see Europe unless I'm taken prisoner. In Hollywood it's fine.

Seriously, how do you do this trick with angelfire and get them to host a mod for free.

It's pretty easy, and costs nothing or I wouldn't do it. There are a couple things to say about using these free sites though. As time goes on, these sites have become less and less charitable. Geocities.com no longer allows me to access my ten Megs or so with an ftp program- I can only upload stuff with their web based shell interface, which is doodoo. Angelfire.com allows me to use my own ftp program, so that's fine.

All these sites however, have figured out that people are using them just to "store" stuff, and they've gotten smart about it. As an example, consider a huge jpeg image file, which I'd like to put on my geocities site so that I can display it in this post I'm writing now. It won't work.

When the geocities server sees that request for that image, it "knows" that the image is NOT being retrieved as part of my html page, just the naked jpeg is needed, for some *other* reason than content of my site. Therefore, the server will instead send a tiny image saying "this image hosted by some stupid free site company". Follow?

Otherwise, these sites are just what they appear to be- a bunch of free space, but whatever site you put up there will be blessed with their popups or their banner, usually your choice.

Er, did that answer you? If not, you know where to post further questions, don't you now?

Eden

[zukkov]

hey i downloaded the "mods" and now my flags are blank! what gives??

[Eden Smallwood]

Originally posted by zukkov:

hey i downloaded the "mods" and now my flags are blank! what gives??

No clue! Do you need the original 449.BMP? Or what are you saying? I don't have a degree in modding, but still that's strange. Details?

Hey you know what; I think I'll put the original 449.BMP up there on that page- that seems like a sensible precedent...there!

Sorry- works fine for me; I tested the whole gamut.

Eden

[zukkov]

this is weird. when i try to open the bmp files, the picture is not there. windows says "no preview available". when i click on properties of the bmp file(hi res), the unzipped file size is 25kb. i can't figure this out. by the way, the original does the same thing. the pic is unviewable...

[Rogue Legion]

Eden, when I tried to install those cool looking flags I get a blank .bmp. I don't know why?

[Mark Gallear]

Thanks Pud - like the site.

[Mark Gallear]

Eden - don't know if yoiu are going to spot this one now - but can you advise me on how to get a file put on a web site downloadable - know I should go and buy a book on HTML.

I have a yahoo site figured out all the code some years ago not done anything since

It is here: Dirty Mark's Game Design Site

I may as well do something with it such as give small mods away

Although I think you should all be looking at this site - Russian Battlefield

[Eden Smallwood]

Originally posted by Mark Gallear:

Eden - don't know if yoiu are going to spot this one now - but can you advise me on how to get a file put on a web site downloadable - know I should go and buy a book on HTML.

Pshaw on the book. Rule One of programming is that you never program if you can avoid it. Whatever you want to do, it's almost a certainty that someone else has already done it, or something extremely similar. So copy that person's code, tweak it a bit... voila. For html, this works just fine. That page I put up- it's kinda pretty, n'est-ce pas? In your browser, while looking at the page, choose 'view source' or whatever it's called in yours, and there you are- html grad course free of charge!!

If you're on Macintosh, get the text editor "Alpha" immediately. For any type of programming, actually. Read the help on the html mode in there, and you'll know more than you ever needed to. Html is kind of a stinker "language", but if you just want to put up a bit of content, you can do anything you need to with very little html. If you agree that my little page up there looks nice, then Why? Not because it's html (or some other scripting language) crazy, but because it uses just a wee bit of html to nice effect. Anyhow.

On geocities you have the terrible disadvantage of having to upload your files via their web shell rather than from the intelligent interface of a dedicated ftp program. Angelfire allows me to use my own ftp program, but then I guess we've seen how easy it is to max out the bandwidth limit...

As far as what actual syntax to use for sticking something up there to be downloadable, why the examples for that are on my site, or on Tom's site, or Scenario Depot... all over, except for those webmasters who feel they have to use an exclusively more sophisticated language to do their site, like php or perl or whatever.

Implement the site on your hard drive, and make all your paths relative, and you can test and change while on your drive without connecting...

Then explain to my why these other guys download my flags and it's just "white" for them?!?

Eden

[Mark Gallear]

Many thanks Eden.

I understood the first bit copy your code. I can manage that I think!

Second bit about map your hard-drive for the files seemed a lot more worrying - At the moment I have all my html,jpegs, giffs in one folder uploaded onto the Yahoo space - each page just calls what is needed. Can I just do the same for the files to be downloaded.

I understood the ftp bit - suppose this will prevent me putting up very large files - like mods of tanks - think this is beyond my purpose anyway!

What will happen if every CM fan in europe wants to down load my icon bar - this does seem extremely unlikely however - what customer load do you think I will get away with!

Mark

[Eden Smallwood]

Originally posted by Mark Gallear:

I understood the first bit copy your code. I can manage that I think!

The most important part I perhaps did not spell out exactly.

1 Peruse web, find html code you like, copy.

2 *Play* with it- make a change, see what happens.

3 Repeat 1 if necessary.

4 Lather, Rinse

Second bit about map your hard-drive for the files seemed a lot more worrying

Not at all. All URLs listed in html code are either Relative or Absolute. An Absolute path spells out the entire path, and does NOT depend on where the "executing" html file resides- an example is the URL I listed for my page above. It starts with "http://www.angelfire....."

A Relative path DOES depend on the location of the html file. Look at the source of my page- the declaration for what the BODY should look like starts like this:

BODY BACKGROUND="../JPG_MoneyCruz.JPG" ......

This is a Relative Path- ".." means "go up a level". If I wanted to use an Absolute Path, I would have put

BODY BACKGROUND="http://anglefire.com/mac/programming/JPG_MoneyCruz.JPG"...

See? Using Relative paths enables you to create a "site" on your hard drive and change and test and change and test all *without connecting*, then when it all works, you can upload it, and it works fine in it's new home. If your html file contains any Absolute paths, your browser will keep trying to connect to retrieve that item.

I understood the ftp bit - suppose this will prevent me putting up very large files - like mods of tanks - think this is beyond my purpose anyway!

Not so much size, as frequency- if you upload often, or have many files on your site, it becomes a serious burden.

What will happen if every CM fan in europe wants to down load my icon bar

Your little icon bar is nothing- it's these huge hunker mods which are reaching band limits; don't worry, unless you start doing multi-tank mods.

Finally, just trust me on this- perform 1 through 4 above, and in two weeks you won't be asking, you'll be telling. It just takes some peeking and experimenting, that's all. But you won't get it from my explaining in this forum; it just doesn't work that way. Study while you're waiting for the AI to make it's next move. Hth,

Eden